Conventionally, there have been disclosed techniques for extracting feature points of the face of a person from a shooting image taken for the face of a person to recognize the face based on how much the face recognizing data with regard to the person to be recognized is in agreement with the above feature points (refer to Patent Document 1). The above-described techniques recognizing the face require registration in advance of the face recognizing data in an electronic camera or the like. In particular, for improving the accuracy of face recognition, more face recognizing data is required. Therefore, it is necessary to generate the face recognizing data from shooting images of a plurality of frames.
Incidentally, in registration shooting for generating the face recognizing data, it is necessary to shoot the face of a subject so as to easily extract feature points of the face. Therefore, there is required an electronic camera, which is provided with a shooting mode capable of performing the above-described registration shooting easily.
Further, on registration of the face recognizing data, it is required to generate the face recognizing data from more shooting image data. If it is possible to generate the face recognizing data, for example, by referring to image data obtained by other electronic cameras and image data obtained in the past, users will benefit greatly in terms of convenience. Further, there is required a measure for allowing an easy face registration without involving complicated and troublesome work in making the face registration.
Still further, in the above-described electronic camera, a plurality of face recognizing data are registered in the memory. Therefore, a user is more likely to have difficulty in managing and editing the thus registered face recognizing data. For example, where the electronic camera is allowed to discriminate a specific registered person by selecting the face recognizing data on shooting or where the face recognizing data on the specific registered person is deleted on editing, it is required that the user can easily and quickly recognize an outline of the face recognizing data and a corresponding relationship of the face recognizing data with the registered person.
Further, an electronic camera having face-recognizing functions is able to customize shooting conditions, image processing or the like depending on the result of face recognition. Now, there is desired an electronic camera capable of controlling functions so as to appropriately reflect the intention of a user even where a plurality of targets to be recognized are shot at once.
Still further, where a plurality of faces are detected inside a shooting screen or where a total number of face recognizing data used in determining of the face recognition is large, an extremely large amount of computations will be required in face recognition processing. In the above case, the face recognition processing requires a long time for computation. Thus, there is still room for improvement in view of the fact that a user is unable to perform shooting easily or more likely to loose a chance of the shooting at the most opportune timing. Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. H06-259534